For the b?chamel sauce

900ml milk (3 and 1/2 cups)

120g butter (3.5 ounces)

120g flour (3.5 ounces)

a pinch of nutmeg

2 egg yolks

100g Parmigiano-Reggiano or Kefalotyri (3.5 ounces)

Instructions

To prepare this Greek moussaka recipe, begin by preparing the eggplants. Remove the stalks from the eggplants and cut them into slices, 1 cm thick. Season with salt and place in a colander for about half an hour.

Rinse the eggplants with plenty of water and squeeze with your hands, to get rid of the excessive water. Pat them dry and fry in plenty of oil, until nicely colored. Place the fried eggplants on some paper, in order to absorb the oil. (For a lighter version of the?traditional Greek moussaka try drizzling the aubergines with some olive oil and bake them for 20 minutes instead of frying them). An alternate to frying the egg plant in a pan on the stove is to throw them on the BBQ and fry on the hot plate – adds a nice hint of smoke to the dish.

Prepare the meat sauce for the moussaka. Heat a large pan to medium -high heat and add the olive oil. Stir in the chopped onions and saut?, until softened and slightly colored. Stir in the garlic, tomato puree and the mince breaking it up with a wooden spoon and saut?. Pour in the red wine and wait to evaporate. Add the tinned tomatoes, the sugar, a pinch of cinnamon, 1 bay leaf and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, turn the heat down and simmer with the lid on for about 30 minutes, until most of the juices have evaporated.

Prepare the b?chamel sauce for the moussaka. Use a large pan to melt some butter over low-medium heat. Add the flour whisking continuously to make a paste. Add warmed milk in a steady stream; keep whisking in order to prevent your sauce from getting lumpy. If the sauce still needs to thicken, boil over low heat while continuing to stir. Remove the pan from the stove and stir in the egg yolks, salt, pepper, a pinch of nutmeg and the grated cheese. Whisk quickly, in order to prevent the eggs from turning an omelette!

Assemble the moussaka. For this moussaka?recipe you will need a large baking dish, approx. 20*30 cm). Butter the bottom and sides of the?pan and layer the eggplants. Pour in the meat sauce and even out. Add a second layer of eggplants, top with the b?chamel sauce and smooth out with a spatula.

Sprinkle with grated cheese and bake the musaka in preheated oven at 180-200C for about 60 minutes, until crust turns light golden brown. Even though it will be really hard.. you should wait for the moussaka?to cool down for a while before cutting into pieces.

So I’ve had an idea to make a RIS and age it for a bit in a barrel previously housed some Kellermeister Wild Witch, but before I get up to seeing if I can’t come to some agreement with Markus that I better get in a bit of practice making them. So kicked off with a kit based recipe as follows:

OG: 1.112 (Shooting for 1.026 FG will see how we go in a few days @ 10.5%).

UPDATE: Gravity at 21/Feb: 1.038 after 7 days. Krausen has collapsed decanted the beer into a different fermenter will see how it is in 12 days time, with a plan to bottle in 14 days, if day 12/13 show activity stopped in the 1.022/1.025 range.

Bottled on 3/April @ 1.036 FG. For an alcohol content of: 11.38%. It’s very green (taste, colour is black!) and hugely bitter at the moment, but there is some very interesting sarsparilla/liqorice/toffee/coffee aciton going on. Will be interesting to see how this develops over time.

This one will require some aging (3 months) before trying and should be capable of ageing like a wine, will see if I can’t stretch it out for for 10 years.

Getting sma-bluetooth to connect to my inverter, and upload to pvoutput proved to not be an exactly trivial exercise. In brief overview the below are the steps I took to get it working. It does however, now work well for auto uploading of data.

So after much fun and games, I finally managed to get monitoring and upload to pvoutput working with sma-bluetooth.